In photos: New Andy Warhol art discovered on old Amiga floppy disks
The Carnegie Mellon University computer club found a dozen Andy Warhol works on the unlabelled disks. The disks were in the Andy Warhol Museum’s archives in Pittsburgh but the museum lacked the outdated Amiga technology needed to read them.
This is one of a dozen previously unknown images by pop artist Andy Warhol. The images were resurrected from aging Amiga computer floppy disks by forensic computer experts from Carnegie Mellon University, the school just announced. The art is owned by the Andy Warhol Foundation, although it was commissioned by Commodore International to promote its 1985 Amiga 1000 computer. This digital image is called “Venus, 1985.”HANDOUT/Reuters
The newly found digital works depict common Warhol subjects, including self portraits, bananas, Marilyn Monroe as well as doodles, camera shots of a desktop, and this digital image called “Campbells, 1985.” The works were recovered thanks in part to someone posting on YouTube a 1985 infomercial showing Warhol using an Amiga computer to create a digital portrait of singer Debbie Harry. A Warhol fan saw the YouTube video and in 2011 began investigating whether there was more computer art from Warhol to be found. His inquiry brought him to The Andy Warhol Museum’s archives in Pittsburgh, where he found a cache of floppy disks that remained unlabeled because the museum lacked the outdated Amiga technology needed to read them.HANDOUT/Reuters
This “Andy2, 1985” is another of the recovered images found on unlabelled Warhol disks by the computer club at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, one of the top U.S. technology schools. It took the club only a matter of hours to reveal the images using a process called retrocomputing.HANDOUT/Reuters